“NEWSTREETSTATIONSIGNALBOX” first appeared in Birmingham, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe.
It might be the first thing you see as you arrive, or the last thing before you depart. You might not notice it at all. It lurks, semi-submerged, at the far end of the platforms, only its top half ever exposed, marking its own corner at Navigation and Brunel Streets: NEWSTREETSTATIONSIGNALBOX. Horizontal pre-cast corrugated concrete cladding units, a boundary parapet wall in facetted vertical pre-cast corrugated concrete, continuous metal windows, walls on either side of the entrance doors finished in vertical glazed tiling. “A dramatic building of exceptional architectural quality with a strongly sculptural form” (says the Architectural Review.) NEWSTREETSTATIONSIGNALBOX: monolithic, sentinel. It warns you to forget it as soon as you’ve seen it: it will make sure it doesn’t even register. A Norman keep for a dangerous age, admitting nothing, half-hiding itself not out of shame but because it’s better for you this way, sunshine. This is brutalism at its most brutal (and yes they’ll tell you it’s not about being “brutal” it’s from the use of beton brut in its construction, but this is a building which would kick your fucking head in.) No one has ever been seen entering or leaving it, no human form is visible within. Its few embrasured windows are blind. Grade II listed and now (probably, secretly) decommissioned, I wonder what Dickensian Signal-man sits inside, haunted by what has passed, is passing, or to come. While it may be too much to suggest that NEWSTREETSTATIONSIGNALBOX is metonymic of the city, this box – impossible to view in its entirety, visible only part-by-part – seems to me the physical form of a city made from the sound of Black Sabbath, Broadcast, Steel Pulse, The Prefects, Surgeon, Napalm Death.
Birmingham is often known and mis-known for its buildings. The Bull Ring is ever-circled, a Mithraic hub overlooked by the panoptical Rotunda, flanked by Future Systems’ blobitecture mound (a rickety retail pleasuredome, a once-shiny temple to Late Capitalism, the plastic discs of its shell now falling away like hubcaps from a shonky car, to be dodged while you’re having a shivery vape and waiting for the 50), underpinned by the chthonic hellmouth of New Street Station (the SIGNALBOX its vigilant warden), now capped and sealed by Grand Central, constantly en- and dis-gorging human matter, overlooked by a gigantic Eye of Sauron (and were Tolkien now holed up on Wake Green Road dealing with his PTSD issues instead of a century ago, it wouldn’t be Sarehole Mill or Moseley Bog to be morphed into Mordor, but perhaps this very place.) Just north, the impossibly thin BT Tower remains as mysterious, impassive and impenetrable as the NEWSTREETSTATIONSIGNALBOX itself, while to the west the Alpha Tower is yet again swamped by a future that has never happened as Paradise Circus is built once again, two steps from the lost omphalos of the now-demolished library, its inverted ziggurat an invisible scar on the city’s psyche, though one which writers and artists still attempt to recuperate, and far less serious than the one inflicted by the still-unclosured 1974 pub bombings, witnessed in turn by the NEWSTREETSTATIONSIGNALBOX, the only inviolate, unchanging sentinel of a true city of the future, always arriving, never becoming.
CD Rose’s books include The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else (both published by Melville House.) He co-edited Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks (Dostoyevsky Wannabe) and is currently working on The Blind Accordionist, a complete edition of the stories of Maxim Guyavitch.